The Archibald Prize and the Royal Easter Show have a great deal in common. Both are enjoyed by the general public, but the entrants in the competitions are very serious about winning.
This year’s winning Archibald Prize portrait, Moby Dickens by Blak Douglas, encapsulates the justifiable rage felt by people living in flooded Bundjalung country
In 1895 the Wynne Prize was proposed as an award for a ‘landscape painting of Australian scenery’. Today it is more likely to be given to an Indigenous artist’s explanation of Country.
The lively reconfiguring of the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman exhibitions means it is harder to work out which paintings the judges are considering as potential winners.
The standard of the 2017 Wynne finalists is as haphazard as previous years, hampered by a sense of tokenism and conventional landscapes, but works by Napanyapa Yunupingu and Juz Kitson stand out.
The Wynne Prize has been notoriously male-dominated. What does this year’s winning artwork by Natasha Bieniek tell us about the nature of this particular award and how we can improve it?
Honorary (Senior Fellow) School of Culture and Communication University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne